Saltar para: Post [1], Pesquisa e Arquivos [2]



"New light on Neolithic revolution in south-west Asia"

16.12.12

 

Gordon Childe’s famous notion of a Neolithic revolution saw the switch from hunting
to herding and from gathering to cultivation as the pivotal agent of change. It was a
model subsequently followed by many scholars. Today the imperative is different: not
economic but cultural and cognitive. Already from about 23 000 years ago, we see
groups of hunter-gatherers in parts of south-west Asia begin to transform their settlement
and subsistence strategies and develop large, permanently co-residential communities well
before the beginning of agriculture. This new form of social life implies that the cognitive
and cultural faculties of Homo sapiens had become capable of managing cultural systems
through external symbolic storage, or monumentality, an essential instrument of social
complexity.
Having rejected Childe’s model of farming as an adaptation necessitated by climate
change and environmental desiccation, Robert Braidwood asked ‘Why then? Why not

earlier?’ That question has mostly been overlooked, but it applies to the emergence of new,
permanent communities as much as to the adoption of farming practices. Braidwood’s
prescient hunch was that perhaps culture was not ready (Braidwood & Willey 1962: 332).
The answer I propose is: (1) only at a certain point in human cognitive evolution did
it become possible for Homo sapiens to transcend certain biological limitations of the
human brain by cultural means; and (2) this increased mental facility was made necessary
by the reliance on larger and more cohesive social groups, itself a product of hominin
evolution.

Autoria e outros dados (tags, etc)




Pesquisar

Pesquisar no Blog